Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel eBook

But in Siberia, where, as we have seen, some of the
large mammalia were caught and entombed in ice, and
preserved even to our own day, there was no “smashing”
and “crushing” of the earth, and many escaped
the snow-sheets, and their posterity survived in that
region for long ages after the Glacial period, and
are supposed only to have disappeared in quite recent
times. In fact, within the last two or three
years a Russian exile declared that he had seen a group
of living mammoths in a wild valley in a remote portion
of that wilderness.

These, then, good reader, to recapitulate, are points
that seem to be established:

I. The Drift marked a world-convulsing catastrophe.
It was a gigantic and terrible event. It was
something quite out of the ordinary course of Nature’s
operations.

II. It was sudden and overwhelming.

[1. “Prehistoric Times,” p. 372.

2. “The Great Ice Age,” p. 466.]

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III. It fell upon land areas, much like our own
in geographical conformation; a forest-covered, inhabited
land; a glorious land, basking in perpetual summer,
in the midst of a golden age.

Let us go a step further.

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CHAPTER VIII.

GREAT HEAT A
PREREQUISITE.

Now, it will be observed that the principal theories
assigned for the Drift go upon the hypothesis that
it was produced by extraordinary masses of ice—­ice
as icebergs, ice as glaciers, or ice in continental
sheets. The scientists admit that immediately
preceding this Glacial age the climate was mild and
equable, and these great formations of ice did not
exist. But none of them pretend to say how the
ice came or what caused it. Even Agassiz, the
great apostle of the ice-origin of Drift, is forced
to confess:

“We have, as yet, no clew to the source of this
great and sudden change of climate. Various
suggestions have been made—­among others,
that formerly the inclination of the earth’s
axis was greater, or that a submersion of the continents
under water might have produced a decided increase
of cold; but none of these explanations are satisfactory,
and science has yet to find any cause which accounts
for all the phenomena connected with it."[1]

Some have imagined that a change in the position of
the earth’s axis of rotation, due to the elevation
of extensive mountain-tracts between the poles and
the equator, might have caused a degree of cold sufficient
to produce the phenomena of the Drift; but Geikie says—­

“It has been demonstrated that the protuberance
of the earth at the equator so vastly exceeds that
of any

[1. “Geological Sketches,” p. 210.]

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possible elevation of mountain-masses between the
equator and the poles, that any slight changes which
may have resulted from such geological causes could
have had only an infinitesimal effect upon the. general
climate of the globe."[1]